The Toronto Film Festival has been a shooting gallery of disturbing, explosive, in-your-face dramas from around the world, reports Michael Dwyer
Film festivals thrive on controversy, and in that respect, as in so many others, the 29th Toronto International Film Festival delivered in spades.
In addition to screening Michael Winterbottom's sexually graphic 9 Songs (reviewed here from Cannes), the festival offered movies dealing with pornography, labial surgery, female circumcision, incest, abortion, adultery and racism.
Having tackled teenage lesbianism in Fucking Amal (aka Show Me Love) and enforced prostitution in Lilya 4-Ever, the adventurous young Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson sets his new film, A Hole in My Heart, almost entirely within a cramped apartment where a dissolute man is shooting a porn movie featuring a male friend and a young woman.
Their drugs-and-drink-fuelled behaviour is viewed impassively by the older man's pallid, reclusive son in this sexually explicit, unremittingly bleak but curiously insubstantial exercise, a visually and thematically ugly movie that appears calculatedly provocative in its gross imagery and its close-up footage of labial reconstruction. It's an angry, nihilistic movie with nothing particularly new to say, even though its familiar observations on pornography are worth restating.
Palindromes (main picture), the new film from Todd Solondz, the confrontational US writer-director of Happiness, opens with the words, "In loving memory of Dawn Weiner", a reference to the troubled teen heroine of his Welcome to the Dollhouse, suggesting that he is putting his obsession with adolescent anxieties behind him. Not so, we soon realise, even though Dawn is indeed dead, having committed suicide after being the victim of date rape.
Enter the palindromically named young Aviva, whose urge to have a child is thwarted by her loving but steely mother (Ellen Barkin on prime form) who insists she should have an abortion. Running away from home and pretending her parents were "vaporised" in the September 11th attacks, Aviva is taken into the refuge run by a Christian fundamentalist named Mama Sunshine and populated by mostly disabled children.
Composed mostly in vignettes and very hard to take seriously (if that is, indeed, what Solondz intended), this interestingly unpredictable film crucially lacks the raw dramatic power of Happiness, and it's difficult to see his point in casting Aviva with eight actors of different age and race, one of them a boy and another played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Palindromes positively pales in comparison with Moolaade, the disturbing but wholly responsible and riveting new film from 81-year-old Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, who unflinchingly tackles the practice of female circumcision in west Africa. The remote village setting suggests some primitive past era - until the sight of radios and television indicate that this is the present and the practice is still widespread. Fatoumata Coulibably strikes a formidable presence as the brave woman, the second of a tribesman's three wives, who dares to oppose the system and suffers cruelly for her stance.
The eponymous husband of Frédéric Fonteyne's 1930s-set Belgian drama, La Femme de Gilles, is a morose and selfish young patriarch who is doted on and loved by his devoted wife (Emmanuelle Devos), even when she, pregnant with their third child, discovers he is having an affair with her younger sister. Gilles's instinctive response is to unleash his simmering frustration in violence.
Devos strikes a captivating presence in this enthralling drama that affirms all the promise Fonteyne showed with Une Liaison Pornographique. Despite its essential harshness, his new film is composed in some of the most beautiful, painterly imagery of recent years.
Gilles also happens to be the name of the adulterous husband in 5X2, the seventh feature in as many years from the remarkably prolific François Ozon. It begins with the cold, clinical ending of a marriage in divorce and then works backwards in the style of Irreversible (although without that film's extreme candour) through happier times to when the couple first met, pausing along the way as we detect the exact point at which this relationship is clearly doomed.
There is nothing gimmicky about this structural device; on the contrary, it proves subtle, mature and revealing as it reflects with perspective on this evaporation of love. Ozon, whose skill with actresses has been evident from his earlier work, elicits an exceptional performance from Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi.
The Canary Islands provide an aptly prepossessing setting for Christopher Honoré's kinky début feature, Ma Mère, an overheated yet compelling Georges Bataille adaptation featuring Isabelle Huppert at her most fearless as a hedonistic widow whose interest in organising a sexual initiation for her sullen 17-year-old son, Pierre, borders on the incestuous. She encourages her friend Rea (Joana Preiss) to undress him and watches approvingly as she gets deeply intimate with him.
As Pierre, Louis Garrel is even more uninhibited than he was in Bertolucci's The Dreamers, but even his intense performance cannot pull off a denouement that is meant to be shocking but registers merely as risible.
Young German director Marco Kruezepaintner takes a refreshingly lighter approach to teenage sexual longings in Sommersturum (Summer Storm), in which the angst-ridden protagonist, Tobi, is a young athlete struggling with his infatuation for his best friend and rowing team colleague. Impressively played by popular German TV star Robert Stadlobler, Tobi is forced to confront his sexuality when his rowers are pitted against an openly gay team, and the consequences are treated with honesty and conviction.
Race and racial tensions are the all-consuming concern of just about everybody in Los Angeles, to judge by Crash, the auspicious début feature from Canadian writer-director Paul Haggis, which is set in LA in the run-up to Christmas. Racist epithets pepper his cleverly tangled screenplay of overlapping incidents linking disparate characters played by a large ensemble cast, which notably includes Don Cheadle, Ryan Phillippe, Thandie Newton, Terrence Howard and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, along with much stronger than usual performances from Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser and Matt Dillon.
Arresting and absorbing, Crash is not quite in the same league as the similarly structured LA stories told in Short Cuts and Magnolia, and it's loaded with one big coincidence, but even that is entirely forgivable as it sets up the most gripping sequence in the whole film. For all its December sunshine, the film presents Los Angeles in a distinctly unflattering light, wound up with prejudice and deep insecurities on all sides of the social divide in the season of goodwill to all men and women.
Michael Dwyer concludes his Toronto reports tomorrow in Weekend
